the cassandra pages

Reading Can Be Difficult

Montreal metro, last winter.

If our attention for long-form reading was already faltering because of texts, social media, and the delivery of online reading material to us in shorter and shorter bits, not to mention our often-frenetic lives, the pandemic drove a decisive nail into that coffin. During those difficult years of fear and isolation, I heard many people say that although they wanted to read books, they found they simply couldn't. They attributed some of this perplexing inability to an overall attention problem, but also noted that their increased level of anxiety and stress was getting in the way of their ability to relax, concentrate and forget about the outside world through a book. Paradoxically, a pastime that had once been a comfort became tortuous. They'd sit down with a book and try to read, but realize that they weren't absorbing the words in front of them. Having to repeatedly backtrack became a chore, and added to the stress. Worse, they weren't enjoying the content of the book either. With their minds already filled with a muddle of anxious, chaotic thoughts, it was hard to get into the book, and hard to lose themselves in its story or ideas. Eventually, many people gave up on long-form reading, and still haven't reclaimed the practice that once gave them so much pleasure. 

And reading a book, especially reading it closely, requires focus and effort. When we spend a lot of time scrolling through short-form info, whether it's news blurbs, social media posts, Tik Tok or Instagram reels, or Twitter/X feeds, what we're doing is essentially consumptive and passive. The constantly changing texts and topics, often accompanied by images, entertain us. We take them in, on a mostly-superficial level, and quickly move on to the next. We have control over the speed of our scrolling, knowing we can always bail out of one thing because it will be followed by an endless supply of alternatives. We don't have to engage in depth with anyone, although we can if we want; we don't have to concentrate any harder than we want to. We're given an easy way to respond to things we like, whether by emojis or a simple click, and we can share those things with others. But our minds don't have to work the same way they do when we read a lengthy essay, article or book -- we're not working the way we do when we're trying to engage deeply or learn something comprehensively.

For those of us who had the kind of education where we were asked about what we read and were expected to be able to talk about it, have an opinion, and summarize the ideas or incorporate them in writing of our own, reading now can be accompanied by a self-critical internal dialogue: "I ought to be absorbing this better," "Huh, I don't remember what I just read, or what I read yesterday," "I'm not enjoying this book at all." That's not much fun. It's far easier to look at a lot of stuff that changes all the time and doesn't challenge our minds to pay close attention. And after a while, that's pretty much all we want to do...maybe even all we are able to do.

I listened to a podcast recently with a woman who now studies attention and works on developing new forms of education designed to foster students' ability to focus. She had been an English literature major, but her comeuppance arrived after she admitted to herself that she hadn't read a novel in years. Sitting down with a book of literature she had loved and written about, maybe fifteen years before, she expected to fall into the rapt spell she remembered. But she was stunned to find out that she simply could not focus, and could not read with anything close to "attention" for more than five to ten minutes. She was so alarmed and shocked -- she "had known her attention was bad" but not how bad -- that she set about to re-train herself. She set aside the same time every day, and read for a little bit longer each session. I can't remember how long she said it took her -- several weeks to a month -- but she did regain her former ability, through painstaking, deliberate effort. From that personal experience, she went on to work on attention as an educational issue, developing new curriculums for children that help them learn how to read attentively, and to absorb and enjoy long texts. Needless to say, smartphones are not allowed in those classrooms.

I'm grateful that I didn't have problems reading during the pandemic. It continued to be the pleasure and solace it's always been for me, but I did feel the isolation very keenly. When I was approached in the spring of 2020 by an online friend about reading Haruki Murakami's IQ84 together, via Zoom, I was immediately interested. We invited some other people from all over the place - I think our locations ranged from India to Arizona -- found a time of day that worked for everyone, and agreed to meet weekly. Many of the original people dropped out after a while, including the person who had invited me initially. But I continued to facilitate the group, inviting some other friends. Today we have a core of seven people who have continued to meet every week, reading and discussing long complicated books. Many of the books are works in translation, set in non-English-speaking parts of the world. I know for a fact that I would not have read or re-read as many of these books without the company and encouragement of a group of equally-committed readers. I'll put our book list at the bottom of this post for you to peruse -- and we can happily recommend any of these titles to you.

Most of us don't think of reading as a communal pastime, so much, but why is that? Yes, you still need to sit down with the book and read the pages, or listen to an audiobook version, and that is usually a solitary act -- though I have one friend who has read books aloud with her husband every night for years and years, and loves to read this way. During the pandemic, I knew of transatlantic couples who read to each other daily, via phone or zoom. I was part of several memorable online events where the participants gathered to read a novella or a play aloud, taking turns and passing the text to each other over and over again, like a baton, over a period of hours. In our group, we often read passages aloud. I suspect there is something powerful and even primal in human beings about animating the word, and hearing it out loud.

Most book groups assign one book per session, and then meet to discuss it just once, before going on to the next one. Our group is more like a seminar. We read 60-100 pages each week, discuss that portion in depth, then move on to the next section. Some people take tangents that they share with the group, such as doing research on an author, historical periods or events. Others are interested in the structure and development of the writing and where it fits in the arc of the author's work. We compare translations and even go to the original languages if one of us knows it well enough. We've astonished ourselves at the places these discussions have taken us, as well as the sheer volume of pages we've read -- it's a perfect example of how doing a large task bit by bit can lead to success. For a whole variety of reasons, this interplay of solitary reading and serious, communal discussion, within the context of friendship, has worked very well.

All of this is to say: there's hope if you've had a hard time reading books in recent years. You might try finding a partner, or a group to join -- like exercise, reading together seems to work. And you might try reading the best books you can find. By that I don't mean only books in some offical "canon" of literature, or that contemporary novels aren't worthwhile; many of them are. Do try looking at the Booker Prizes, PEN award, National Book Award shortlists, books by Nobel winners and other major award recipients. I am no fan of "best books of the 21st century" lists and their ilk; better to me are lists of writers and books from countries new to me. I've read a lot of novels, both new and famous older ones, by writers from India, Africa, Japan, Korea, South America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Russia, and Scandinavia that have opened my eyes, not only to those cultures but to different ways of working with language to tell a story. During those years when I couldn't travel, these books took me on their wings.

So don't be discouraged - you aren't alone, and you can actually get your reading chops back. The woman I described above did it a good way, sticking to a few minutes each day, and gradually increasing. We lose practice gradually, and we have to regain it gradually, so be patient. And again, I would love to hear about your own experience: are you reading as much as you used to? What makes reading challenging, and what works for you?

 

Our Book Group List, 2020-2024

2020

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

2666, Roberto Bolaño

1Q84, Haruki Murakami

 

2021

Arturo's Island, Elsa Morante

Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, trans.

Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje

The Laexdal Saga (from Sagas of Icelanders)

Under the Glacier, Haldor Laxness

Milkman, Anna Burns

O Pioneers, Willa Cather

Agamemnon, Aeschylus 

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

2022

The Eye of the Rigal, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 3) 

White Shadow, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 2)

The Unseen, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 1)

How I Became a Nun, Cesar Aira 

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Cesar Aira 

Several short stories, Borges

The Reluctant Gaucho, Roberto Bolaño

Recitatif, Toni Morrison

The Birds, Aristophanes 

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

 

2023

Pig Earth, John Berger (Into Their Labours, Vol 1) 

Moby Dick, Herman Melville 

Three Short Works, Gustav Flaubert 

Shared Silence, Lalla Romano

The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr

Just a Mother, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 4)

Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk 

Night Train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier 

The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk

 

2024

The Magic Mountain, Thoman Mann (in progress)

James, Percival Everett 

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain 

The Covenant of Water, Abraham Vergese  

Don Quixote, Cervantes 

The Fraud, Zadie Smith 

Lilac and Flag, John Berger (Into Their Labours, Vol 3)

Once in Europa, John Berger (Into Their Labours, Vol 2) 

Books of 2023

I feel like I read a lot in the last year, but there aren't that many books on my list, mainly because several were very big ones. The two largest were The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick, both read with my book group, but Orhan Pamuk's Nights of Plague was also a long read. If you have never read Moby Dick, as I somehow had not, I encourage you to do so - it really does deserve its reputation as one of the greatest novels of all time.

It took me 75 or 100 pages to warm up to Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob, which is written in an unusual style that eschews detailed dialogue or description of the characters' thoughts or feelings, but instead relies on description of events. We found that challenging, because we just didn't have the normal ways of entering the characters' heads, but by sticking with it, the reader is rewarded with immersion in their world -- in this case, Jewish communities in eastern Poland/western Ukraine in the mid-to-late 1700s. At that time, a self-proclaimed "Messiah" named Jacob Frank appeared, and gained an ardent following. Of all the books our group read this year, this one probably created the most lively and wide-ranging weekly discussions.

Other books that stood out for our group were Lalla Romano's A Shared Silence, an intense novel about two couples in the Italian resistance, and Pamuk's Nights of Plague, an epic about a made-up Mediterranean island dealing with an outbreak of plague, and the politics and human behaviors that result.

I was thrilled about the publication of Teju Cole's Tremor, his first novel since Open City. Readers here will know that he and I are long-time friends, and I was privileged to be one of the first readers of the manuscript, so I don't feel that I can "review" the book objectively. I will say that it is beautifully written and conceived, as we have come to expect from Teju; it is timely, dealing with subjects from marriage to racism, from the ownership of art objects to the complexities of academic life, from friendship to, perhaps most importantly, death. It is also experimental, pushing the structure of the novel in new directions, and involving the reader in a reading experience that is not entirely linear. So, of course, I recommend it highly.

Greek Lessons, by the Korean writer Han Kang, intrigued me because of its title and also because of its knockout cover, and I was not disappointed. This book, also, pushes the form of the novel, and tells a poignant story of two people who use the study of language to address their own difficulties in communication. It's probably the most unusual novel I read this year. I plan to write a full-length review of it later.

While we're speaking of highly original writing, I was extremely impressed by Nay Saysourinho's The Capture of Krao Farini. This short, chapbook-length work defies categorization as to genre; it is listed by the publisher, Ugly Ducking Press, as poetry, and could be called a narrative prose poem of sorts; it includes illustrations that are integral to the text. It is a work of art that cuts to the heart of what human beings are capable to doing to each other; it's the most original thing I've read this year and I found it brilliant, deeply disturbing, and haunting.

More recently, our book group has begun John Berger's trilogy, "Into Their Labours", about the lives of peasants in the French Alps near Berger's home in the second half of his life. As V., one of our book group members, said, "I am attracted to Berger right now because of his deep humanity," and she was right; these are books that get to the essence of what is human, what constitutes survival, what we need most, and what is unnecessary. They are antidotes to capitalism, consumerism and fads, social media and modern conformity; they're not without violence, but it tends to be the violence of raising and slaughtering your own animals for food, or the rough feuds of local people. Likewise, Patrick Leigh Fermor's Roumeli speaks of Greece before mass tourism, when wandering tribes of herders still moved through the remote mountains, speaking dialects that were already in danger of being lost, and mountain-top monasteries were still inaccessible except by horseback or donkey. Having visited some of these remote places myself, his words were more meaningful now than when I first read the book some years ago, and I find myself feeling grateful to both him and Berger for writing down what they observed, and what came to matter deeply to them. This encourages me as a writer, too -- that the daily lives of ordinary people do matter, and it is in our hands as writers to preserve the truths of their existence.

I should also mention that I do a lot of online reading of shorter fiction and essays (in places like The New Yorker, Emergence Magazine, Beshara, The Guardian long reads, quite a few individual Substacks) and I'm a regular subscriber to Brick, a very fine Canadian literary journal which doesn't confine itself to solely Canadian authors, and publishes a lot of work by people of color, indigenous writers, and immigrants, and (I think) as many female as male writers. Do check it out; it's a good journal to support.

Please, as always, do share your own reading lists or highlights from this year! Here's my full list:

2023

The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar (in progress)

Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor (rereading)

The Capture of Krao Farini, Nay Saysourinho

Pig Earth, John Berger #

Tremor, Teju Cole

A Recipe for Daphne, Nektaria Anastasiadou

*Greek Lessons, Han Kang

*Moby Dick, Herman Melville #

The War that Killed Achilles, Caroline Alexander

The Tentmaker, Michelle Blake

Three Short Works, Gustav Flaubert #

*A Shared Silence, Lalla Romano  #

The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr #

Just a Mother, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 4) #

Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk #

Woman at Point Zero, Nahwal el Saadawi

House of Names, Colm Toibin

District and Circle, Seamus Heaney

Amsterdam, Ian McEwan

Night Train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier #

*The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk#

The Other Side of the Mountain, Journals of Thomas Merton Vol 7., Fr. Thomas Merton

Enduring Love, Ian McEwan

The Innocent, Ian McEwan

Review: A Recipe for Daphne

I'll probably never go to Istanbul in spite of it being a very enticing destination; my husband's Armenian heritage isn't compatible with Turkish politics or revisionist history. However, I was very pleased to read and review Nektaria Anastasiadou's  new novel A Recipe for Daphne, for Cha: An Asian Journal, which is based in Hong Kong. It's an engaging, well written novel about the dwindling Rum (Greek Orthodox) community of Istanbul, their complicated history and challenging future. I also reflected on the history of the different religious and ethnic minorities under and after the Ottoman Empire, including that of my Armenian and Protestant in-laws. When doing the research for the review, I learned a lot more about the history of the ethnic and religious minorities in former Ottoman territories and in Turkey -- and it is not a happy story. Please go to the review page on Cha if you'd like to read the full piece; I'll just excerpt a little of it here. Kosmas, mentioned below, is an Istanbul pastry chef who falls in love with Daphne, a beautiful American woman visiting her aunt in Istanbul and searching for her own roots.

Kosmas also turns out to be a romantic idealist, as symbolised by his search for a recipe for a once-famous pastry called the Balkanik. While Daphne returns to the United States to see her parents and make a final decision about moving, he spends months trying to recreate the delicacy for her, from notes in an old Ottoman cookbook unearthed by his Muslim assistant. The Balkanik was a sort of large éclair, filled with eight differently coloured and flavoured creams, representing each of the original tribes of the Balkans: Bulgarians, Romanians, Albanians, Greeks, Serbs, Croats, Jews, and Turks, all existing together in harmony.

---

I understand this longing. My own father-in-law was an Arab Protestant from Damascus who had lived under Ottoman rule, in a family that had survived persecution, and yet spoke movingly of the vibrant multiculturalism of all the great cities of the Near and Middle East, and his friendships with the local Orthodox priest, and Jewish, Muslim, and Maronite schoolmates. He too was a lover of proverbs. My mother-in-law was an Armenian, born in Turkey, whose father was killed in the Armenian genocide along with all the other men of their village, and who had managed to escape with her mother and small brothers for a life in Alexandria and then Beirut. During their lifetimes, they watched as the once-thriving Christian communities in many of these ancient cities became smaller and smaller, and deplored the religious and political fanaticism that caused it. Like Daphne’s parents, they had wistful memories, but little desire to go back.

A few months ago, I was in Greece myself, and spent a week in Thessaloniki, the largest major city close to Turkey. Once under Ottoman rule, and still retaining many ties to Istanbul through the Orthodox Church, Thessaloniki also offers many Turkish culinary traditions—like the Rums of Istanbul, we ate gilt-head bream, sesame bracelets, cream-filled pastry shells, and honey-drenched baklava, and sat for hours over our plates of delectable mezze while watching ships come and go on the sea. I could well imagine wanting to stay there for a lifetime. In Thessaloniki we also saw an exhibition of Armenian photographs taken in Turkey between 1900 and 1950, documenting the history of a family whose lives mirrored that of my mother-in-law. Thessaloniki is close to the Turkish border, but the exhibition would never be allowed in that country, where the Armenian genocide has never been acknowledged.

Thank you to Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, editor of Cha: An Asian Journal for publishing this review, and for all the tireless work she does on behalf of Asian literature and writers. I first "met" Tammy when Dave Bonta and I were editing qarrtisiluni, where she submitted excellent work that we published on several occasions. That was a long time ago! It's always a pleasure to find these old connections circling back around, and to make new ones.

 

 

Book List, 2022

The list of books I read in the past year is the shortest in memory, partly because of all the things that happened this year to disrupt my reading time, but also because it contains three very long titles. Most of my reading was connected with my zoom book group, and we began the year reading Tolstoy's War and Peace. That occupied us during most of the cold months last winter, appropriately enough. It was my third time through, and I feel like I got even more out of it, especially by virtue of the close reading with astute friends. Among us, we read several different translations, and this also added to the depth of our discussions. I was the one who had pushed us to read it, and so it was a delight to watch the group engage with and, at length, fall in love with the book and its characters, and appreciate Tolstoy's tremendous gifts as a novelist. The biggest gratification for all of us came at the end when several members who had been reluctant at first, or who had tried previously and never gotten through it, expressed their feeling of accomplishment and happiness at having met this monument of literature, which everybody agreed really does deserve its rating as one of the greatest novels of all time.

We then drew a deep breath, and decided to read a number of short works, of which the two by César Aira stand out particularly, along with Aristophanes' comic play The Birds.

During the summer and early fall, we read the three volumes of the Barrøy Chronicles by the Norwegian author Roy Jacobsen, and I cannot recommend them highly enough; the books follow a woman, Ingrid Barrøy, from her childhood to early middle age, as she grows up and then takes responsibility for a small island off the northwestern coast of Norway; the books spans the years from the early 1920s to around 1950. What may have originally started as a descriptive narrative of the extremely difficult life of the isolated islanders and their precarious existence due to extreme weather, poverty, and unpredictability, it becomes a human story of one astonishing woman whose remote life is intruded upon by world events. There is a fourth volume coming, and we await it anxiously!

In November I read Color Creates Light, a book that presents the teachings and life of Hans Hofmann, considered by many to be the father of abstract expressionism (one of his drawings, a view of Provincetown, is below). While this is not explicitly where I expect my art to go, the book was extremely helpful and eye-opening for me, and it's one I'll be going back to frequently for inspiration and insight. Hofmann carried on from Cezanne, who had moved on from impressionism to develop a new way of depicting nature by using planes of color that solidified the forms and locked the picture plane together.

Cubism developed out of this, along with the further innovations of Picasso and Matisse, which then gave rise to what we think of as 20th century modern art. Hofmann analyzed and understood exactly what Cezanne had done, but took it into the realm of pure color and abstraction. He is considered the most influential teacher of the new generation of painters who became known as abstract expressionists. I had always been curious about this lineage and how it came about, but found the bits of Hofmann's teaching I had read quite obscure and hard to follow (others, even his students, agree -- it was partly a problem of language issues between German and English.) So this book, by a former student, clarified a great deal and opened a lot of possibilities and challenges for me in my own work.

Finally, we've recently begun Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk's massive novel, The Books of Jacob, which immerses us in the Jewish world of eastern Poland (near Ukraine) in 1750, a time and place where many cultures collided through travel, trade, and migration, and where a young man, Jacob Frank, was hailed and followed as the Messiah. It's fascinating, often bizarre, written in a somewhat fragmentary style that (like the place itself, perhaps) presents different threads and seemingly-unrelated people until they begin to come together into the story of Jacob himself. We're only about 1/3 of the way through the 900-odd pages so far, so I can't say much more than that; this remarkable book will continue to occupy us for several months.

As always, I'm anxious to hear what you've read this year, what stood out for you, what disappointed you, and what you're looking forward to reading in 2023!

2022 Book List

The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk#  (in progress)

Enduring Love, Ian McEwan

Color Creates Light: Studies with Hans Hofmann, Tina Dickey

The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100 - 480 BC, Jeffrey M. Hurwit

The Eye of the Rigal, Roy Jacobsen (Barrøy Chronicles 3) #

White Shadow, Roy Jacobsen (Barrøy Chronicles 2)#

The Unseen, Roy Jacobsen (Barrøy Chronicles 1)#

A Time of Gifts: on Foot to Constantinople (Book 1 of a trilogy), Patrick Leigh Fermor

How I Became a Nun, Cesar Aira #

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Cesar Aira (rereading) #

Several short stories, Borges #

The Reluctant Gaucho, Roberto Bolaño #

Babylon Revisited, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Recitatif, Toni Morrison #

The Birds, Aristophanes #

Intimacies, Katie Kitamura

Feline Philosophy, John Grey

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (rereading with my book group) #

The Journey to the East, Hermann Hesse

Hamnet & Judith, Maggie O'Farrell

# indicates a book read with my book group

Books of 2021

Well, here is the list of books I read during the past year, and I am grateful for every one of them. Each became my companion for a time during this second pandemic year, and through many of them, I was joined by the intrepid members of my book group who met every Friday morning to discuss the next 50 or 100 pages of whatever novel we were reading together at the time. We helped each other finish a lot of long and sometimes difficult books, we kept each other company, and got to know each other better as friends. So although reading is, by its nature, solitary, it's hard for me to look down this list and not think of the experience with certain titles as a shared one. I know that this sort of group is not for everyone, but it's been good for me, and as facilitator for most of the books, it's really kept me on my toes.

If I could only recommend one of these books to you, I think it would be Milkman, by Anna Burns, written about Ireland during the Troubles: one of the freshest, most original pieces of writing I've read in years, with brilliantly-drawn characters who will win your sympathy. I've just finished Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante, and admired her writing, though the story of a boy growing up on an island off the coast of Sicily is one that makes you cringe at times. While we're talking about islands, there was the Laexdal Saga, from The Sagas of Icelanders, well worth anyone's reading time as a vivid portrait of human love, jealousy, greed, generosity and wisdom 1000 years ago, with characters who leap off the page and feel entirely recognizable. Finally, Roy Jacobsen's The Unseen is the first book of four about people living impossibly difficult lives on tiny islands off the coast of Norway. It's Nordic noir without even trying to be; I've only read the first in the series but found it absolutely compelling.

The year began with Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which is a book that should be on every serious reader's shelf and taken down several times as we go through life, because with each reading, it reveals something new to you about yourself. I was very happy to read it with the book group; I think we all got more out of it than we would have alone.

Teju Cole's Black Paper is a collection of essays not just about race, but about the dark side of human nature as well as the forces of beauty that are its counterpoint, and most employ his signature style of interweaving seemingly-unrelated ideas or subjects to give a new perspective. Golden Apple of the Sun combines a series of photographs of his kitchen countertop during the pandemic with a concluding essay that is a searing indictment of racism from the early days of American colonial history. Fernweh, on the other hand, is a book of carefully-sequenced photographs taken in Switzerland that has been a consolation to me this year, not because they are pretty or conventional pictures, but because in depicting a place that at once feels closed but seductive, both artificial and natural, beyond-human and yet curated and manufactured, it somehow evoked the strangeness and alienation of the world in which we've found ourselves, but lands squarely on the side of beauty, offering a space in which to breathe. It has stayed on my bedside table since the day it arrived.

A confession: I started with the intention of reading all of Dante's The Divine Comedy, but found Inferno hard going: it's because the year itself was just too depressing to spend more of it in a fictional or imagined hell! On the other hand, I thought that Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil was one of the most brilliantly-written books I've ever read. It's not well known, and it's written in a daunting stream-of-consciousness style with page-long sentences and few paragraph breaks, to which you simply have to surrender, allowing yourself to be swept along. The reward is that if you stay with it, your view of what it might mean to meet one's impending death, as a literate and conscious person, will be enlarged and changed.

Finally, I was surprised to find myself enchanted and then almost obsessed by Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. I had read almost all of Hesse's other works, but not this one, his last major novel, which sets up a hypothetical world in the future where education and culture are preserved and controlled by an elite group of celibate, secular, male intellectuals who live in near-monastic remove from the "real world" of ordinary people. The high achievers of this elite society became Masters of the "Glass Bead Game", a never-fully-described exercise in which participants make connections between disparate aspects of cultural artifacts or knowledge, such as relating a law of physics and a Bach sonata. The book provoked a great deal of thought about contemporary academia and tensions between the life of the mind and "real" everyday life in the world; European intellectual life prior to WWII; the preservation of human culture; relationships between men and women; and the interplay (or lack thereof) between political history and cultural/scientific achievement. If you didn't read it back in the 1960s, take a look now! To whet your appetite, I'll include, at the end of this post, my somewhat lame but colorful response to our group leader's challenge to create a mini "glass bead game" ourselves.

Happy reading in 2022, and, as always, please let us know in the comments what YOU read in 2021 and what books were highlights for you! I look forward to hearing from you.

 

2021

We Are All Equally Far From Love, Adania Shibli

The Unseen, Roy Jacobsen

Arturo's Island, Elsa Morante #

Dubliners, James Joyce (excerpts)

Shifting the Silence, Etel Adnan

Time, Etal Adnan

Black Paper, Teju Cole

The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse#

Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, trans.#

Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje#

Unwinding Anxiety, Judson Brewer

Real Presences, George Steiner

The Lowlands, Jhumpa Lahiri

Golden Apple of the Sun, Teju Cole

Fernweh, Teju Cole

The Laexdal Saga (from Sagas of Icelanders)#

The Interior Circuit, Francisco Goldman

The Little Red Chairs, Edna O'Brien

Under the Glacier, Haldor Laxness #

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, a monograph by various authors

The Hostage, Brendan Behan

Milkman, Anna Burns#

The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Dante

Faithful and Virtuous Night, Louise Gluck

O Pioneers, Willa Cather #

Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes

Agamemnon, Aeschylus #

The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch

Travels with Epicurus, Daniel M. Klein

The Return, Hisham Matar

A Month in Siena, Hisham Matar

Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami

The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante

Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, Luisa A. Igloria

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky #

# indicates a book read with my book group. Stats:  37 books total; 14 by women, 23 by men, vast majority read as e-books. 20 of these books were written originally in English, 17 read in translation.

 

 

Hermit Diary 51. Books of 2020

Roberto Bolaño and Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

Books of 2020 (list at the end of this post)

Books have been my salvation during the months of isolation. I know many people have said they've had trouble concentrating on reading, but my situation has been the opposite: for me it's been a deep dive. One thing that's helped is an online book club of far-flung friends which grew out of a desire of a friend for companionship reading Murakami's IQ84 during the early days of the pandemic. Sadly, that friend decided they didn't really enjoy reading with a larger group, but some of the people stayed on with me and we've formed a cohesive and congenial group. We've mostly been reading long, challenging books together that we might not have read alone, and meeting each week via Zoom for a discussion -- and it's been great. The other reading group of which I've been a part for several years has not met regularly, so there's been a shift, but it was with that group that I read Beloved and re-read Americanah in the early part of the year.

The #1 standout of the year for me was Roberto Bolaño 's 2666, a huge, challenging, harrowing, and brilliant book I had been afraid to read on my own, but which we tackled together in the new group after completing IQ84. I am so grateful now for having read it -- it's one of those books that changes you forever, both as a reader and as a human being. I've long admired Bolaño 's writing, and completed Savage Detectives and several of his shorter novels in previous years. But 2666 is both masterwork and monster-work -- the great unwieldy sort of literature Bolaño himself said was the only literature worth giving one's life to -- that grapples with the most important themes and questions that confront human lives. A work in five parts, each one a "book" on its own, but related, it is perhaps unfinished - other fragments were found in Bolaño 's papers after his early death - but he raced to complete these parts before succumbing to his illness, and the result feels complete while leaving many questions for the reader unanswered -- which could also have been his intention.

We're currently reading The Brothers Karamazov, which is the other major fiction standout for me this year. Supposedly I read it years and years ago, but I barely remember it, so Dostoevsky's plot and characters are coming to me afresh and vivid. I'm in awe of what he attempted and accomplished, and sad about how slight, insubstantial and superficial most literature of today seems by comparison to either of these two books.

Having said that, I both enjoyed and cringed at Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, her thinly-disguised autobiographical account of a young woman's affair with an aging writer who resembles Philip Roth, and very much liked Scorpionfish, by Natalie Bakopoulos, a novel about relationships and choices set in modern-day Athens and on one of the Greek islands. But though I've admired some other books by Rachel Cusk, I lost patience with her perturbed, blaming voice in Coventry.

My interest in Japanese literature has continued with contemporary works by Banana Yoshimoto and Yoko Tawada, tense re-readings of The Frolic of the Beasts by Yukio Mishima and Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, and then Kawabata's new-to-me The Master of Go, which is actually non-fiction literary reportage of the highest order, about an epic, months-long final match between an elderly Go master and his young challenger who represents a new generation of players as well as customs. (If you enjoyed watching The Queen's Gambit, as I did, this book would make a very interesting counterpoint.)

Toni Morrison's Beloved, of course, is a work that ranks with the highest, and one that I was grateful to read even before Black Lives Matter became the major movement it did in 2020. I think I wrote admiringly in a previous year about Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Later this year I read James Baldwin's searing novel Giovanni's Room, and several non-fiction books about racism, all of which I recommend. I'm ashamed that I hadn't read Beloved or The Fire Next Time before now.

Three non-fiction books rise to the top of the list. One was Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who brings both a botanist's and Native American's knowledge to one of the most fascinating natural history books I've ever read, and inspired me to rekindle my own interest in primitive plants, gather some moss and lichens of my own in the fall, and make two terrariums that are still doing very well in mid-winter here in my apartment. The other two are books about Greece by the great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, that were particularly meaningful to me because of having traveled in the same areas many decades after the books were written. Roumeli (1966) is about the disappearing tribes, villages, customs and linguistic complexities Fermor encountered in the north-central mainland, and Mani (1958) is about the fierce and independent people of the remote peninsula of the southern Peloponnese where Fermor eventually made his home, and where Jonathan and I traveled to consign the ashes of his mother to her beloved Mediterranean. Late in the year, I also read Fermor's memoir about three writing retreats in Orthodox monasteries, A Time for Silence.

In the Mani near Anatoliki. Pen-and-ink in my Greek sketchbook, 2019.

To my surprise, I felt lukewarm about Virginia Wolff's To the Lighthouse, and never finished The Voyage Out: I'm sorry but while appreciating her modernist approach to point-of-view and female perspective, I found them both tiresome, although I love her non-fiction and essays, and liked Mrs. Dalloway more than either of these novels. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera was just as good as it had been the first time around.

I was impressed and riveted by David Foster Wallace's essay This is Water, and his long essay on Dostoevsky and his biographer Joseph Frank, and it made me think perhaps 2021 is the year to attempt Infinite Jest, and certainly to read his essays in Consider the Lobster, which concludes with the piece on Dostoevsky. I will leave you with a quote from Wallace's essay, with which Bolaño would almost certainly have agreed:

“The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we here, today, cannot or do not permit ourselves...

“It’s actually not true that our literary culture is nihilistic… For there are certain tendencies we believe are bad, qualities we hate and fear. Among these are sentimentality, naïveté, archaism, fanaticism. It would probably be better to call our own art’s culture now one of congenital skepticism. Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material possession is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.”

Will the pandemic and the paroxysms of political tensions and change finally alter this fact about modern American literature? Perhaps 2021 will be too soon to tell, but I eagerly wait to see.

And, last but not least: what have you read in 2020, and has it been easier or harder than usual? Please send me your lists! Here's mine:

** are this year's standouts; *books I liked a lot but not in the top tier; # books read with my book club

 A Legacy of Spies, John le Carré (in process)

**Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer

**The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky # (in process)

A Time for Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Make Ink, Jason Logan

The Road to Santiago, Cees Nooteboom (in process)

Inés of My Soul, Isabel Allende (dnf)

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez # (rereading)

*Scorpionfish, Natalie Bakopoulos

The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf (dnf)

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf #

Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday

The Emissary, Yoko Tawada

This is Water, David Foster Wallace

**2666, Roberto Bolaño #

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

The Four, Scott Galloway

False Spring, Darren Bifford

How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi

Moonlight Shadow, Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto

The Frolic of the Beasts, Yukio Mishima (rereading)

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron (rereading)

*Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata

**The Master of Go, Yasunari Kawabata

The Woman of Porto Pim, Antonio Tabucchi

*1Q84, Haruki Murakami (rereading) #

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Stout

*Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie # (rereading)

Coventry, Rachel Cusk

**Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Writer and the World, V.S. Naipaul

*Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin

**Mani, Patrick Leigh Fermor

**Beloved, Toni Morrison #

Flights, Olga Tokarczuk

Normal People, Sally Rooney

Pond, Claire Louise Bennett

 

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 4: Shakespeare

                    But when the planets
in evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth.
Commotion in the winds, frights changes horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure!

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

It's probably not surprising for me to turn to literature during times like this, as I search for historical patterns and the meanings that past writers have found in similar events. In The Atlantic, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a professor of English at Linfield College, writes "Shakespeare wrote his best works during a plague:" an article about present and past theatre closures due to epidemics from bubonic plague to AIDS, and the dramatic literature that came out of those times.

Shakespeare's work is full of references to the plague, which took the lives of several of his young brothers and interrupted his own life several times. Productions had to be halted, theatres closed, and Shakespeare, as actor/producer, was left to go back to writing. In 1593, he wrote poetry during the closures, and in 1606, he wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. The plague also figures in a number of his plays. Here's a quote from Pollack-Pelzner:

"In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, written just after the end of the 1593 outbreak, the friar who’s supposed to tell Romeo that Juliet is only pretending to be dead gets prevented from delivering his message because he’s quarantined with a fellow priest who’s been helping the sick: “The searchers of the town, / Suspecting that we both were in a house / Where the infectious pestilence did reign, / Sealed up the doors and would not let us forth.” Romeo never gets the message, of course, and he kills himself before Juliet revives."

Shakespeare was just echoing prevailing beliefs when he blamed plagues and earthquakes and violent storms on "planets in disorder" or the wrath of God. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would still do that, if they couldn't conveniently blame this particular horror on "foreigners." What I noticed particularly in the quote from Troilus and Cressida was the wonderfully-stated and apt comment that these disasters "divert and crack, rend and deracinate/the unity and married calm of states" from what before felt firmly fixed -- just as we now witness the world's most successful economies, and supposedly top-drawer health care systems, cracking apart and tearing up the roots of the seemingly-solid states themselves. What is new to us was not new at all to a keen observer like Shakespeare, who never stopped at the event itself, but sought to look underneath and behind and beside it, as well as having his characters predict possible futures that could result.

In watching Trump's pathetic, deluded performance during this crisis, it seems as if we're seeing a drama unfold in the same proportions as some of Shakespeare's history plays or his immortal tragedies: a tragedy that will go down through the ages in history and in literature. The king blusters and blasts and blames through the first act; in the second he concocts fantastic schemes; but by the third, he's relegated to one side of the stage, where he sits, defiant, his jaw set, having lost every shred of our sympathy, while the disaster he's failed to prevent swirls around him, his toady-ing ministers desert him, and once-minor characters begin to take the reins or emerge as heros.

What we can't see yet, of course, is how it all ends.

"Woe to that land that's govern'd by a child!
All may be well. But if God sort it so,
'Tis more than we deserve or I expect."

William Shakespeare, Richard III (II.3)

---

(Portrait drawing by me, in pencil, 3.5" x 5")

 

Book List - 2018

In the past year, I read fewer books than usual, but if anything I thought about them more. The year began with a big project: reading Homer's Odyssey chapter by chapter with two other friends, each of us reading a different translation and discussing them online. As the only one of the three readers with any ancient Greek, I was the one who looked up and struggled through passages we wanted to compare. This not only revived my interest in the language but rekindled my desire to go to Greece, which came true at the end of the year. The final book I'm reading, Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven, is a novelistic treatment of the life of Alexander the Great, whose Macedonian birthplace we visited. There were a number of other classical books, or works inspired by them, in the early part of 2018 - specifically several by Seamus Heaney; Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire, a version of Antigone with an immigrant heroine and her brother, a suspected ISIS terrorist; Alice Oswald's Memorial, a poem that lists all the deaths mentioned in the Iliad, and Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey, about teaching the book to a class that included his own father and then going on a trip with him that recreated the ancient voyage.

Besides this focus, books I particularly enjoyed in the past year were William Finnegan's Barbarian Days, an autobiographical book about surfing that held me riveted from the first to the last page; Cesar Aira's bizarre and miraculous Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, Michael Ondaatje's luminous latest novel, Warlight, set in post-WWII London,, and Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami's most recent collection of short stories, many of which appeared first in The New Yorker.

The book that impressed me the most was probably The Diaries of Emilio Renzi, Vol 1: The Formative Years, by Ricardo Piglia, one of the greatest of all Latin American writers. When diagnosed with a terminal illness, he spent the last ten years of his life compiling, revising and editing the huge volume of journal notebooks he had kept throughout it under the name of his alter-ego, Emilio Renzi. They are just now being published in English.  The concept is monumental, and the writing extremely compelling; for someone like me who has kept journals off and on all her life (including this blog) it was a mind-bending project. Vol 1 covers the years when he was beginning to want to be a writer, through university, and up to the time his first book was published that brought him acclaim -- so it is the diary of a writer becoming a writer. It was a great contrast to last year's mammoth project (Knausgaard). Volume 2, The Happy Years, came out in November, and I look forward to reading it. I followed Vol 1 with one of Piglia's novels, which was great, but confess I liked the journals better. If you like Bolano, you will appreciate these.

Finally, in the fall, Jonathan and I both read William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, a memoir of the writer's pilgrimage in the footsteps of 6th-century monk John Moschos who visited Orthodox monasteries all over the Byzantine world of his time. Dalrymple's journey begins on Mt Athos, Greece, takes us to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the West Bank, and ends in the Egyptian desert. The book was written in 1997 and chronicled not only where Moschos went, but the lived reality of the same monasteries fourteen centuries later, most of which were, or had been, under attack by other religions and political groups and were currently inhabited by only a handful of monks; his own visits sometimes alerted the authorities and endangered the present monks, who could be accused of harboring a spy. But it was exactly the right book for us to read before our own first trip to see the Byzantine world at closer quarters; I'll be writing about our trip to the ancient monasteries at Meteora, Greece very soon. 

As always, I look forward to hearing what you've been reading too, so please post your lists in the comments as well as your reactions to any of what I've said or listed here! And best wishes for happy reading adventures in 2019! I'm anxious to read the next Piglia, as I said, and the new Murakami novel, Killing Commendatore; also on my list is the Alexandria Quartet of Lawrence Durrell, and The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel about Sicily. How about you?

 

2018  (**=favorites)

Fire from Heaven (Alexander the Great trilogy, Vol 1), Mary Renault

**Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami

A Sort of Life, Graham Greene

**From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, William Dalrymple

Artificial Respiration, Ricardo Piglia

**The Diaries of Emilio Renzi, Vol 1: The Formative Years, Ricardo Piglia

The Sense of Sight, John Berger

Transit, Rachel Cusk

**The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, Cesar Aira

Quarantine, Jim Crace

**Warlight, Michael Ondaatje

Memorial, Alice Oswald

In the Night of Time, Antonio Munez Molina

Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

Unreasonable Behavior, Don McCullin

**Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan

An Odyssey, Daniel Mendelssohn

No Time to Spare, Ursula LeGuin

**Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie

Aeneid Book VI, Seamus Heaney

The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney

The Foliate Head, Marly Youmans

**Burial at Thebes, Seamus Heaney

**The Odyssey, Robert Fagles, translator (rereading with friends, each a different translation)

Greetings from the Deep Freeze

It's one thing to have a few bitter cold days now and then: that's just part of living in the north. But the cold has been unrelenting up here for more than a month; I can hardly remember a winter when it was below 0 degrees F. for so long. The Celsius readings have hovered around -19 to -23, and out in the country they've been in the minus 30s. Today is a heat wave - about 12 degrees F.! It feels almost balmy! The mountain of plowed snow in the studio parking lot has become a mountain range, and I'm grateful every day that I don't have to keep shoveling out a car that's parked on a city street: people are really having a hard time this year.

Between Christmas and New Year's, we built ourselves a new IKEA bed, and completely tore apart and rearranged our bedroom. Meanwhile, my husband's computer underwent an automatic operating system upgrade that trashed everything, so he spent a lot of the holiday week trying to reconstruct his digital life. Then the same thing happened to mine. We had daily backups, so there was little damage or loss, it was just a pain in the neck. He quickly got my computer back up and running, but yesterday I realized that all my accounting files for Phoenicia had been in a different location, and the data starting from the middle of 2016 was gone, and not backed up where it should have been. Today I began reconstructing them. Strangely, it hasn't put me into too bad a mood. Like many other things, I figure I'll just do a little bit every day, and eventually it will be done. The cliches run through my head: "No use crying over spilt milk"; "what's done is done."

We've also had the inevitable mid-winter colds, sneezing and coughing our way through the month. Unlike Europe, our January and February here in eastern Canada tend to be bright and sunny a lot of the time, so I haven't felt depressed by grey days. What the cold does is make me feel cooped up, because I can't walk: it's far too cold and far too icy underfoot for walking-as-exercise. So, although I try not to make New Year's resolutions, I did vow to get back to the pool and to some sort of exercise regimen. That began last week in earnest, and it does feel better.

A double-length cowl in progress, in Alegria yarn from Manos del Uruguay.

I'm working on the design and layout for the new book by Luisa A. Igloria that Phoenicia will be publishing in March, The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis. And I'm trying to draw a little every day, and finish a knitting project, and cooking soups and stews and baking bread, as well as reading The Odyssey again, along with two friends. We're each reading a different translation (I'm reading Fagles, the others are reading Wilson and Lombardo), one Book a day, and talking about them as we go - a perfect midwinter project that reminds me of Sicily and the Mediterranean, and the Greek cities we visited. 

Circe turning Odysseus' men into swine, from The Golden Iliad and Odyssey, by Martin and Alice Provensen: the book that first hooked me on the classical myths, and still has my all-time favorite illustrations. The look on Odysseus' face, in the background, is priceless.

Knausgaard, Romans and Sicilians: my annual reading roundup, 2017

The faces that launched 3,000 pages: Amitava Kumar with Karl Ove Knausgaard in Reykjavik.

With the sigh that always precedes the first page of a massive reading project, I moved on from the final book of Elena Ferrante's sprawling, steamy, and gritty Neapolitan Quartet, which I loved and which had been a precursor to our travels in southern Italy, to the chilly and tormented Scandinavia of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle. In the spring of 2017, the writer Amitava Kumar posted a picture of himself with Karl Ove Knausgaard at the Icelandic Literary Festival. I wrote to Amitava (we follow each other on Instagram) saying that the photograph had felt like a sign that I couldn't avoid these books any longer. Later I wrote again: "I'm nearly through three of the volumes, and finding them disturbing, illuminating, and absolutely brilliant. But among my literary friends I can't find a single one who's actually read the books!"

Later, of course, I did find friends who had read them: longtime commenter, poet, and London friend Jean Morris, for instance, who shares my opinion. It seems that readers either love or hate Knausgaard, the latter type dismissing him as a narcissistic egotist, in love with his own voice. I'm in the former camp: I think what he has done is a contemporary continuation of the efforts of Joyce and Wolff to redefine the novel and convey the inner workings of our minds, in all their mundane detail as well as their occasional glorious heights of insight and expression. He has also been willing to cut himself wide open and risk both personal criticism and his closest relationships for the sake of the call of his literary work. I could not do it, but my work won't last, either: Knausgaard's will.

Like the New Yorker critic James Woods, I found the books "fascinating even when I was bored." Much of the writing is not boring at all, and although some women apparently are not, I was riveted by his detailed description of being male, from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood; it's not like anything I've ever read. While his extremely difficult relationship with his father is central to the books, I especially remember his accounts of his own struggles as a parent and husband: being the reluctant but dutiful child-carer for his young children while his wife was going back to school, how emasculated he felt, how bored and resentful; how painful it was for him to enter into a shared social life, how love and family obligation constantly conflicted with his desire to be alone and writing; how this affected his marriage, how guilty he felt for quarreling and how impossible it was not to. I cringed reading about his childhood relationships with other boys, and his sexual problems as a young man, but there too, I felt privileged for the window into a world I didn't know, and grateful that he had the courage to write such things down in excruciating detail.

So I admired his brutal honesty, and found that the greatest impact of the books was the way they forced me to examine or even analyze my own mind and heart: what did I really feel? I suppose I do this anyway, perhaps more than many people, but Knausgaard's honesty insists on your own -- perhaps this is one reason he makes many readers uncomfortable. I'm with the reviewer (Rachel Cusk) who called his work "the most significant literary enterprise of our times."

The statistics on my book list this year are unremarkable: 30 books, instead of the usual 35-40; 12 by women, 18 by men. 17 e-books, 1 audiobook. The lower overall count is because so many of these books were massive, dominated mostly by the Knausgaard series, each of which is over 600 pages. Encouraged by my husband, I've listened to more podcasts, watched more tv drama series and documentaries. I've read a lot of things online, and kept up with blogs and journals, but I was also writing seriously for a lot of these months. So I've been reading all the time, but the mix has changed, and there have been fewer and fewer printed books in my hands: perhaps an ominous statistic for a publisher.

I read and liked Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond -- quirky, disturbing and original -- having seen that Knausgaard recommended her work. Other standout novels in this year's list were Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, which I re-read with my book group, and John Berger's G, which I'd somehow never read before.

The Danish Girl, by David Ebershoff, is a sensitive and often painful exploration of one of the life and relationships of one of the earliest transgender surgery patients. Ebershoff was my friend Teju Cole's editor for Open City, and we met at the launch party for that book; I enjoyed talking to him and was glad to read his own writing. I also read Suspended Sentences, a trilogy of three short novels by Nobel winner Patrick Modiano, on the recommendation of my friend, avid reader Bill Gordh -- I'll definitely be reading more of Modiano's work.

Teju's Blind Spot was, of course, a favorite and without doubt the most important book to me, personally, last year: original, beautiful, searching, and truly genre-bending -- the sort of book I wish publishers still risked, but seldom do. I was delighted that Random House published it, after the original Italian printing, and in such a fine edition. I also greatly appreciated the photobooks My Dakota by Rebecca Norris Webb, and La Calle by Alex Webb, with essays and photographs about Mexico.

Other than the novels, much of my reading was connected with travels to Rome in 2016 and Sicily this year. Back when I was studying classics, I focused mainly on ancient Greece, so after being surrounded by Roman architecture, art, and inscriptions in Italy, I was inspired to read more about the ancient Romans, beginning with Mary Beard's eminently approachable S.P.Q.R. and moving on to some of the philosophers I had never read, such as Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. Two books about Sicily that I've found both enjoyable and valuable were The Stone Boudoir: Travels Through the Hidden Villages of Sicily, by Theresa Maggio, a writer from Brattleboro, Vermont, whose family roots are Sicilian, and British historian John Julius Norwich's essential Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History.

I've read a number of poetry manuscripts this year, including two that I've chosen to publish through Phoenicia in 2018, but the book of poems that has kept me company was The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013. As I wrote to Dave Bonta for his year-end list, "It's a big book, and it's been beside the bed all year, where I've dipped into it for an hour or just a few minutes, always finding phrases or metaphors, descriptions and emotions that touch me. Walcott's background was entirely different from mine, but we shared some loves, such as classical literature, European cities, the sea, nature, and watercolor painting. But I've been moved the most by his writing about being a black man in a white world, his writing about the American South, and his poems about the Caribbean, where he felt at home. His mastery of the English language is complete. I think this collection has brought me a lot closer to sensing the man behind the poems." The new book on my bedside will be Les cent plus beaux poemes quebecois: a Christmas gift from my friend Carole, and I pledge to read one poem from it every day.

So, here's the 2017 list: how about yours? What are the most memorable books you've read in past year? Or even the worst ones? I always appreciate the thoughts you share in the comments or send me by email after this annual post. And happy reading in 2018!

---

Book List 2017 (full list, starting in 2002, here)

Les cent plus beaux poemes quebecois, Editions Fides, with art by René Derouin

A Disappearance in Damascus, Deborah Campbell (in progress)*

The Nautical Chart, Arturo Perez-Reverte** (in progress)

Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, John Julius Norwich

Suspended Sentences, Patrick Modiano*

Stand up Straight and Sing, Jessye Norman

The Stone Boudoir: Travels Through the Hidden Villages of Sicily, Theresa Maggio*

Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett*

Dancing in the Dark, (My Struggle, Book 4), Karl Ove Knausgaard*

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy (re-read)*

A Death in the Family (My Struggle, Book 1), Karl Ove Knausgaard*

Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit*

Boyhood Island (My Struggle, Book 3), Karl Ove Knausgaard*

A Man in Love (My Struggle, Book 2), Karl Ove Knausgaard*

The Danish Girl, David Ebershoff*

Blind Spot, Teju Cole

Incontinent on the Continent, Jane Christmas

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius*

Treatises on Friendship and On Aging, Marcus Tertullius Cicero*

S.P.Q.R. A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard

One Art (Letters of Elizabeth Bishop), Robert Giroux, Editor*

One Indian Girl, Chetan Bhagat (horrible!)

La Calle, Alex Webb

Saving Rome, Megan K. Williams

G, John Berger*

The Golden Bough, James George Frazer (in progress)*

Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, J. W. N. Sullivan

My Dakota, Rebecca Norris Webb

The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante*

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013